Thank you all or your remarks,
@coleman, I have tried to "age" running rigging, tea wasnt as good as coffee, in fact the threads that hunging on sails are in facted aged... Too much work for very small difference, but in my next built I will make a bucket of coffee and rest biege thread insde.... for a week and check it before starting rigging
Port and Starboard Wales finally on.
Took me while to decide how to make up the width with the timbers from the kit.
The upper hull planking is 1.0mm thick.
The wales: decided on a 1.5mm top plank, then 5 planks 2mm thick. So the wales ended up with 2 x 0.5mm steps over the top edges.
I decided to blacken the edges of the top and bottom planks with the aim to give a sharp edge(hopefully not to cut in later on) to the change in colour/clear.
Might do some planks across the stern next, before talking the lower hull planking.
Hi Jason, glad to see you back and thank you!
As far as your model, have you use walnut aftermarket dowels for the middle and upper stems of the fore and mainmast?
Thanks again.
Putting rigging aside for a wee while to do some work on the yards. Decided that I'm going to keep the jib boom off for as long as I can as it really does seem to make working on the ship easier (and probably safer).
The yards are probably the last point where I think this build could stall, so I'm quite keen to get past this. Per instructions, yards were shaped with a small davids plane to get a rough shape and then sanded to shape. I'm not sure the dimensions given in the plans are 100% accurate, but I'm following them anyway. I will be more meticulous with "Jason" when I get to this point as I'll follow the AOTS book closely. I've started with the main yard as a prototype and will finish this one before doing the others together. Additional detailing, cleats and blocks should be fun, but I'll leave that for now.
To help secure the yard to the mast I inserted a small length of brass wire and drilled a hole in the mast, as well as installing the sling cleats. There are some photo etch 'caps' that go onto the end of the yard, not sure these are needed, but they do have some wings on each side, presumably to simulate an iron band. I don't have a photo, but they were way to thick/big at this scale and removed them. I will possibly simulate with thin paper strips.
The kit provides two soft metal pieces to make up the quarter irons, which are to be joined by brass wire. These are too thick for scale, but I think the kit can be forgiven for this. After fiddling, I decided to replace the cast mast band with a thin strip of styrene, but thin card would probably be easier to use. The hoop for the studding sail yard has two bumps that I'm guessing simulate the hinge and cotter pin. These need to be lined up I think and be parallel to the waterline.
The various pieces were drilled, glued together and attached to the yard. To get these to align properly I used a piece of long dowel feeding into each hoop allowed each one to be fine tuned before glueing in place. Also helped ensure they are symetrical, especially important for the boom irons.
Yard dry fitted for first time...
I had ordered some walnut dowel for the studding sail booms. Of course, I now come to find that the alleged "3mm" dowel is in fact 2.5mm Would welcome opinions on whether this looks OK, 0.5mm seems a big difference.
Using supplied 3mm beech dowel (of course, slightly larger than 3mm!) perhaps illustrates whats intended. No need for a decision now, but it does appear a little more to scale so I'll probably try my luck again and order some 3mm walnut dowel.
